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Review of Selected Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics

Jim Michnowicz, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, North CarolinaState University

SUMMARYThis volume is a collection of sixteen selected papers originally presented atthe 4th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics held in 2008 at SUNY-Albany. Papersincluded vary in length and scope, from the two longer plenary papers by JoséLuis Blas Arroyo and Jonathan Holmquist to shorter, more focused papers based onconference presentations. The volume is divided into four main sections bygeneral topic: Plenary sessions, phonological and morpho-syntactic variation,discourse analysis and language contact.

In his plenary paper entitled ''Variación lingüística e identidad en la Españaplurilingüe: una aproximación multidisciplinary'', José Luis Blas Arroyo tacklesthe difficult question of linguistic identity in Spain since the transition todemocracy thirty years ago. Focusing primarily on language use in Catalonia, butalso with numerous examples from Basque and Galician, Blas Arroyo demonstrateshow the official recognition by the Spanish State of regional languages hasimpacted all facets of public life in that country. He argues that language isundoubtedly an important factor in the construction of identity, but at least inmodern Spain, may not be the most important one. While for many speakers ofregional languages in Spain – and importantly as Blas Arroyo points out, alsofor many Castilian speakers – language is inherently tied to ahistorico-cultural sense of belonging, the issue is complicated by the highlevels of migration to minority language areas both during and after the Francodictatorship.

In the second plenary paper, ''Gender in context: features and factors in men'sand women's speech in rural Puerto Rico'', Jonathan Holmquist addresses thevarying roles (or lack thereof) that gender plays in language variation. Basedon extensive fieldwork in the town of Castañer, Holmquist uses the 'genderparadox' observed by Labov (2001) as a point of departure for analyzing a rangeof linguistic variables. Holmquist correctly observes that gender is oftenassumed to be a deciding factor in language variation and change, but that byand large, women and men behave in very similar ways. Results indicate thatgender patterns differently depending on the type of variable. For example,gender was not found to correlate significantly with stable sociolinguisticvariables, but that men use significantly more of the stigmatized variables,characteristic of change from below. For prestigious changes from above,however, women are leaders in standardization. Importantly, the overallconclusions of this paper are that gender differences depend on the type ofvariable studied, but in spite of the observed differences, men and women bothdemonstrate the same linguistic conditioning – i.e. the same grammar – for allvariables.

In ''The lateral variant of (r) in Cuban Spanish'', Gabriela G. Alfaraz addressesthe possibility of a change in progress /r/ > [l] in the speech of recent Cubanimmigrants to Miami. Alfaraz found an overall rate of lateralization of 10%,higher than that reported in previous studies. The strongest factor indetermining /r/ > [l] was found to be phonetic context. Age was the mostimportant social factor, with younger speakers producing significantly more [l].Likewise, both men and lower class speakers lateralized more. Finally, Alfarazfound that secondary work in the underground barter economy, of the type foundin Cuba, strongly favored the production of [l]. She notes that lateralizationmay serve as a marker of economic independence and working class values.

Manuel Díaz-Campos and Carmen Ruiz-Sánchez compare variable (r) deletion inAndalusian and Venezuelan Spanish in ''The value of frequency as a linguisticfactor: the case of two dialectal regions in the Spanish speaking world''. Theauthors set out to determine how the same linguistic process, (r) deletion,patterns in two different dialects. Importantly, the authors argue for theinclusion of lexical frequency (see Bybee 2002, among many others) insociolinguistic analyses. Lower social class or education correlates withincreased deletion in both dialects, although a comparison of age groupssuggests that while (r) deletion is stable in Venezuela, it may be undergoingchange in Andalusia. Finally, both dialects show the same pattern regardinglexical diffusion – high frequency words favor deletion, whereas low frequencywords favor retention. The authors argue that including lexical frequency as anindependent variable in sociolinguistic studies allows for a betterunderstanding of processes of language change.

Charles B. Chang addresses another probable change in progress in ''Variation inpalatal production in Buenos Aires Spanish''. Focusing on the devoicing of thevoiced palatal fricative, results indicate that devoicing strongly correlateswith age, the most important factor analyzed; younger speakers of both gendersproduce the devoiced form almost categorically, whereas older speakers display arange of voiced options. Chang concludes that different from before, palataldevoicing is no longer correlated with gender and now serves primarily as amarker of age. He does suggest, however, that the devoiced palatal likelydistinguishes urban speakers from Buenos Aires from their peers in other areasof the country.

In ''Aspiración y elision de la /s/ posnuclear en un programa televisivovenezolano'', Craig R. Stokes presents data collected from recorded telephoneconversations to a call-in TV program in Venezuela. Stokes analyzes severalvariants of /s/ - [s], [h], Ø, and a rare aspirated nasal - vis-à-vis speakersex, geographical origin, and the phonetic context of the /s/. He finds thatoverall, elision of /s/ is the most frequent variant, followed by aspiration,the sibilant, and finally the aspirated nasal, which accounts for less than 1%of the tokens. Elision was found to be more frequent among men, whereas womenaspirate more often.

The first study in the section on morpho-syntactic variation is ''El uso variablede los pronombres sujetos: ¿qué pasa en la costa Caribe columbiana?'' by RafaelOrozco and Gregory Guy. The authors examine the linguistic and social factorsthat constrain the use of explicit vs. null subject pronouns in the Spanish ofBarranquilla, Colombia. Results demonstrated an overall frequency of explicitpronouns of 35.7%, which the authors note places the Barranquilla dialect firmlywithin the Caribbean dialect region. Factors favoring explicit subjects include:a change of reference, verb tenses other than future, 1st person singularsubject, all sentence types except subordinate clauses, stative verbs, and ageover 50 years. The authors conclude that younger speakers may be employing more'standard' null subjects as a result of increased education and immigration fromcentral areas of Colombia. Some of the results seem to support the functionalhypothesis, by which subjects will be expressed when needed for disambiguation,while other results appear to be anti-functional in nature. Importantly, Orozco& Guy note that studies of this sort can be used as a baseline for the study ofSpanish in contact in the United States and elsewhere.

Roberto Mayoral Hernández and Asier Alcázar examine the variation in position ofadverbials (pre-verbal / post-verbal) in ''A diachronic analysis of frequencyadverbials: variation in Peninsular and Latin American Spanish''. Based on datataken from two corpora of written Spanish, the authors demonstrate that adverbposition responds to stylistic and sociolinguistic constraints, and is notsimply syntactic as had previously been suggested. The results suggest that achange may be underway in adverb position. Peninsular Spanish as a wholeevidenced a preference for post-verbal position, while Latin American men showeda significantly higher proportion of preverbal adverbials. Spanish men alsodemonstrated the same tendency toward pre-verbal position. The authors concludethat men, and Latin American men in particular, may be leading a change frompost-verbal to pre-verbal adverb placement already (almost) completed in otherlanguages, such as English and French.

In ''Spanish concordantia temporum: An old issue, new solutions'', SandraSessarego presents corpus data from two Andean dialects on a change in thesequence of tenses in subordinate clauses requiring the subjunctive. AndeanSpanish is known for its lack of agreement, where the subjunctive in thesubordinate clause is in the present tense even when it refers to a past action.Using data from Bolivia and Peru, Sessarego found that this change in form ismost advanced in Bolivia, where the lack of agreement has spread to all verbclasses. In Peru the change is at a less advanced stage, where it is stillrestricted to verbs of certain classes. This process of simplification, wherebythe past subjunctive is replaced with the present subjunctive, is more frequentin journalistic writing than in literature, and parallels a change alreadycompleted in spoken French.

The final paper in the morphosyntax section is ''Variable constraints on pastreference in dialects of Spanish'', by Chad Howe and Scott A. Schwenter. Theauthors examine how the present perfect (PP) is encroaching on the domainspreviously reserved for the simple preterit (pret) in Andean Spanish. Overallfrequency shows that Lima, Peru patterns between Madrid, which highly favors PP,and Mexico City Spanish, a dialect with only canonical uses of PP. The authorsargue, however, that a simple comparison of frequencies across dialects does notcapture the internal mechanisms of change, as it hides a potentially great dealof variation in use among dialects. Analysis revealed that while Lima and Madridwere both undergoing the change from perfect > perfective (attested in bothFrench and Northern Italian), there is more than one path available thatdialects or languages may take. For example, very few examples of PP with_hodiernal_ and _prehodiernal_ sentences were found in Lima, suggesting thatLima Spanish still conserves many of the prototypical uses of PP, unlikepeninsular Spanish as exemplified by Madrid.

The first of three discourse analysis papers is Sonia Balasch's ''Debe (de) ser:evolución de la variación''. According to prescriptive texts, _debe_ ('should') +infinitive is used as deontic modality (obligation), while _debe de_ +infinitive expresses epistemic modality (speaker's evaluation). In use, however,''confusion'' is reported between the two structures, in which speakers do notfollow the prescriptive division in modalities. Using a corpus of 509 tokenstaken from literary works from two centuries (17th and 19th), Balaschinvestigates the role of a number of factors on the choice between _deber_ and_deber de_. Results of multivariate analysis demonstrate that _deber_ isincreasing at the expense of _deber de_. The most important factor was modality,with _deber_ first overtaking _deber de_ in the deontic modality (per theprescriptive use), followed by epistemic uses (which prescriptively should take_deber de_). Thus the author concludes that the present situation is not one of''confusion'', but rather is the synchronic observation of a diachronic process ofthe evolution of these structures.

Yayoi T. Aird analyzes uses of the discourse marker _y_ 'and' in ''Linguistic andsocial variables influencing the accent on the discourse marker y among PuertoRican bilinguals in Hampton Roads, Virginia''. The genesis of this study is theremark by previous work that _y_ is accented when it begins an interrogativephrase. This study found that 17.7% of the tokens of _y_ as a discourse markerwere accented. Significant variables in the accentuation of _y_ includedphonetic context and prosody, subject familiarity, phrase length, placement of_y_ in the conversation, and a speaker's sex, age, and years of residence in theUnited States.

In '''Bueno', a pragmatic Castilianism in Galician'', Juan Antonio Thomas studiesthe use of Spanish _bueno_ 'well, so; lit. good' in Galician. Based on data froman oral corpus of Galician, Thomas determined that 69% of the speakers used theCastilian 'bueno' in their speech, with the same pragmatic uses as found in thatlanguage. Acoustic analysis demonstrated that 'bueno' was phonologically adaptedto Galician. The author concludes that 'bueno' represents an establishedborrowing in Galician, rather than a code switch. Thomas also addressesquestions of linguistic identity and prescriptivism in Galician vis-à-viscentury's old Castilian influence in that language.

The section on language contact begins with ''Language contact and change: Directobject leísmo in Andean Spanish'', by Liliana Paredes & María Luz Valdez., theauthors investigate the use of the dative clitic _le_ in place of the accusativeclitic _lo_ in two varieties of Peruvian Spanish. Bilingual speakers of Quechuaand Spanish follow pan-Hispanic norms of increased _le_ use with [+animate][+human] referents, while the monolingual speakers fail to show the samepattern. The authors argue that shifting speakers from Quechua may havesimplified the complex accusative clitics in Spanish, and defaulted to thesimplest form, dative _le_. The outcome has been to produce a structure(_leísmo_) acceptable in Spanish, but not widespread in Peruvian dialects.

Marcela San Giacomo and Sharon Peperkamp analyze the phonological adaption ofSpanish loan words in Nahuatl in ''Presencia del español en náhuatl: estudiosociolingüístico de la adaptación de préstamos''. Based on data from bilingualspeakers in a small Mexican town, about 17% of the tokens were found to beadapted to Nahuatl phonology. Speakers from the more isolated part of town adaptmore, along with older speakers and men. Adaptation was also increased amonghigh frequency words and when speaking to well-known interlocutors. Resultssuggest that adaptation lessens as speakers come into more contact with Spanish.

The final paper is ''Turkish word order and case in Modern Judeo-Spanish spokenin Istanbul'', by Rey Romero. The author investigates two possible cases ofTurkish influence on a rapidly dying variety of Judeo-Spanish. One possible caseis adjective placement; Romero's results show that older speakers maintain thenative Spanish distinction in pre and post verbal position, while youngerspeakers prefer pre-verbal placement for all adjectives. Thus speakers who arelosing their Judeo-Spanish have simplified the rule of adjective placement,perhaps under influence from Turkish. Likewise, Romero suggests that youngspeakers may be marking direct objects syntactically, in a way similar toTurkish's use of an accusative marker.

EVALUATIONOverall, this volume is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Spanishsociolinguistics. The included papers represent a wide range of methodologiesand areas of study, although as to be expected, the majority of the papers arewithin the variationist paradigm. With the exception of a few typographicalerrors, the volume is of high quality, and many of the papers will no doubt findtheir way into course reading lists in the near future.

For the most part, the independent papers presented go well together to reflectcurrent research in the field. The one potential weak point is that while a fewpapers make important theoretical contributions, several of the papers areprimarily descriptive in nature. This, however, does not take away from thequality of the volume as a whole, since any dialectologist/sociolinguist willtell you that you cannot construct a viable theory without good data. Thisvolume on the whole presents good data, and thus can serve as the basis forfurther work in the field. It is hoped that many of the authors will furtherexpand on their research in the future.

In sum, this volume will become indispensable to students and professionals inthe field of Spanish sociolinguistics, and as most of the papers are written inEnglish, will be accessible to a wider sociolinguistic audience as well.

ABOUT THE REVIEWERJim Michnowicz is Assistant Professor of Spanish at North Carolina StateUniversity. His research interests include dialect change and standardization,linguistic expressions of identity, and dialect/language contact.